Slate

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Imagine the difficulties of being a Disney movie, much less a Marvel-Disney movie, in the 21st century. The financial pressures to bust the block on a g...

Every relationship has The Moment. Not the moment when you take your partner home to mom or when you finally compromise on the correct number of pillows to have on your bed. I mean The Moment when your potential boo reveals that they own an All Lives Matter shirt or that they sincerely believe that ...

On this week's episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. It follows up on his controversial best-seller The Better Angles of Our Nature: Why ...

The courtroom fight between Uber and Waymo is over; now the race to get an autonomous ride-hailing service to market is back on. On Friday, we learned that Waymo--the self-driving car arm of Google parent Alphabet--has made one huge stride: The company applied to become a transportation network comp...

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. While it's certainly not embarrassing or uncommon to use a dating app, plenty of people don't want to broadcast it. For Tinder users, though, that's hap...

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. "I see you keep winning Elizabeth also you have an awesome smile." Winky face. Blushing emoji. Blushing emoji. These messages would have been innocent enough, hardly a blip in the often-crass landscape of direct messages women have come to ...

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. The renowned robot-maker Boston Dynamics released a new, and likely highly produced, video on Monday of its latest robot "dog," the SpotMini. From the l...

Two tech heavyweights gathered in a San Francisco courtroom last week for what was supposed to be a truly epic battle. Waymo, the self-driving car project of Google parent company Alphabet, had initially sued Uber over the alleged theft of more than 100 trade secrets. According to Waymo, the deed we...

After a tense, often absurd week in court, Uber and Waymo on Friday settled a long-running intellectual property lawsuit regarding the alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. Courtroom highlights included Waymo's lawyers playing the "greed is good" speech from the movie Wall Street (because...